“Answers to letters of inquiry show that these schools for women are looked on with great favor.”
[118]. Chadwick, “Admission of Women to the Massachusetts Medical Society,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1881.
[119]. The editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal announced this decision with great regret. The writer declared it “to be impossible that women can frequent our public meetings or lecture-rooms when certain topics are discussed, without breaking through barriers which decency has built up, and which it is for the interest of every lady and gentleman to preserve.... The moral tone of the society will soon be perceptibly lowered.”—(Loc. cit., October, 1879.)
The success of the movement was due to the chivalrous energy of a group of younger members, especially Drs. James and Charles Putnam, Dr. Chadwick, Dr. Cabot, and Dr. Derby.
[120]. It will be remembered that it was the experience gained in the rude hospitals of the Revolutionary War, which, by affording American physicians for collective observation of the sick on a large scale, first breathed some scientific spirit into the profession. Similar experience was afterwards gained in the epidemics of yellow fever and of spotted fever, that at different times ravaged the country. An analogous influence was exercised by the Civil War, which influence is becoming most distinct a quarter of a century after its close.
[121]. It was also ruled that “any cases deemed improper for a mixed audience should be reserved for the end of the lecture, and that the surgeon before proceeding with them may require the withdrawal of all male or female students as the case may be”; further, “No female patient shall be taken into the amphitheatre without the attendance of a female nurse: and no operation upon a female patient requiring special exposure shall be performed in the presence of male visiting students.”
In this simple and even-handed manner were adjudged the vexed questions that had been declared so insoluble.
[122]. New York Medical Record, Jan. 1, 1870.
[123]. These inadequacies might be rectified, without necessarily introducing into clinical practice the brutalities that so often disfigure the European treatment of hospital patients.
[124]. Including Dr. Jacobi, Dr. Emil Krackowizer, Dr. Guhleke. The two former were German radicals of 1848, and in this action remained consistent with philosophic principles of their youth.